screenplayprohdfandomcom-20200214-history
File System
Introduction There are 4 partitions on the drive. Partitions 1-3 are the operating system of the ScreenPlay Pro HD and you should not delete those partitions. The 4th partition is the media partition. It comes formatted as NTFS, but you can reformat it as FAT32 using the FAT32 formatting tool that comes with the drive. Be careful, though, as it will also let you format other drives on your system for FAT32 as well. FAT32 format utility This can be found on your CD that came with the ScreenPlay Pro HD or at the Iomega support website. Read Iomega's support page about the utility before using it. What to use? NTFS can hold files much larger than FAT32, and stores them more efficiently, since NTFS uses smaller allocation blocks for larger drives than FAT32 does. FAT32 files are limited to 4 GB or less. However, FAT32 is more compatible to other operating systems and can be easier to recover files from. EXT3 The 4th partition can also be formatted to an EXT3 partition, which is the partition type used by Linux. The drive will recognize it and automatically mount it with the existing startup scripts. So you would be able to use links and a much more reliable file system. However, you cannot then use the drive as a USB drive under the Windows operating systems because they don't recognize EXT3. There are solutions out there for using EXT3 under windows, but there are also warnings against using those solutions, to protect the integrity of the file system. Partition Sizes Obviously the 4th partition could be a FAT32 instead, or an EXT3 NTFS Maintenance In order to keep the drive running in tip top shape, or if you are seeing a file you cannot delete on the drive, you need to run the error checking command in windows (right click on drive, select properties, go to Tools. Error checking command is the graphical version of "chkdsk"). You must have the drive connected via USB to do that. You should check the "Automatically fix the file system" to clean up problems. However, this solution cannot be used if the device is in use (eg open in explorer window), it tells you to reboot to have it check during bootup. But because it's a USB drive, it won't. A solution is to run "chkdsk" from a command line interpreter: select Startup--> Run, type 'cmd' (without quotes) and press enter. At the prompt, type 'chkdsk K: /X' (no quotes, assuming K: is your letter drive) and press enter. This will unmount the disk and repair the file system. Another workaround is to disconnect the drive (safely remove hardware, shut off the drive) then turn the drive back on. As soon as it comes on, go to the error checking tool. It will usually be able to do a file system check then and fix the corrupted files. To avoid corrupted files, be sure to always do the "safely remove hardware" feature in windows. Also be sure to turn off the drive by pressing the power off button before disconnecting it from the computer.